Electronic components using a ceramic material include capacitors, inductors, piezoelectric elements, varistors, thermistors, and the like.
Among ceramic electronic components, multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLCCs) have advantages such as compactness, high capacitance, and ease of mountability.
MLCCs are chip-type condensers that may be installed on the printed circuit boards (PCBs) of various electronic products such as imaging devices (or video display apparatuses) including liquid crystal displays (LCDs), plasma display panels (PDPs), and the like, as well as computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), cellular phones, and the like, to charge or discharge electricity.
As electronic products have been reduced in size and increasingly have higher speeds, MLCCs are required to be reduced in size and increased in capacity.
Thus, in order for a chip having the same size as that of an existing chip to have higher capacity, more dielectric layers are required to be stacked, using a larger amount of high-k dielectric materials.
However, when the stacking number of dielectric layers is increased, a difference in sintering properties between an active region and a cover layer in a capacitor body may be increased.
Thus, after a capacitor body is sintered, a portion thereof connecting the active region and the cover may be cracked due to stress that occurs due to the difference in sintering properties.